


Episode 8 – All the Things

by PJVilar



Category: The Outs
Genre: Epilogue, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 17:23:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PJVilar/pseuds/PJVilar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mitchell steps right in a puddle as he’s stammering through his relationship debrief with Jack. It figures. Somehow no rain has fallen since last night yet the streets are slick and the sky is overcast. Yet Jack Widdows wanted to go for a long walk, and there are times, even now, when Mitchell just can’t say no to Jack Widdows.</p><p>Happy, happy Yuletide. :)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Episode 8 – All the Things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [electrumqueen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/electrumqueen/gifts).



Mitchell steps right in a puddle as he’s stammering through his relationship debrief with Jack. It figures. Somehow no rain has fallen since last night yet the streets are slick and the sky is overcast. Yet Jack Widdows wanted to go for a long walk, and there are times, even now, when Mitchell just can’t say no to Jack Widdows.

“We don’t,” Mitchell tries again. “Never mind.”

“We don’t never mind,” Jack repeats. Hands jammed into his pockets, he keeps step with Mitchell, puddles and all. “Double negative.” He tilts his head. “ I expect better things from you.”

“We don’t fuck a lot,” Mitchell blurts out just as they pass two older women with their umbrellas up despite the lack of rain. Jack muffles a laugh as they glare and Mitchell lowers his voice. “Seldom. Me and Other Jack. We seldom fuck.”

Jack is wide-eyed at the admission. “Better grammar.”

“Fuck off.”

“So,” Jack says quickly. They’ve hit a Don’t Walk sign and standing still for this is incredibly uncomfortable. Mitchell stares straight at the glowing red hand and is relieved Jack does the same. “That’s. Not great.”

“Not really. I mean, it’s not bad.”

“The sex?”

“That’s not bad either,” Mitchell says. “When it happens. I meant more like, the whole thing isn’t bad.” He unbuttons his coat. The weather is disturbing, warm and then too cold and then warm again, like it’s just out to get them . The light changes and they walk in step again.“ It’s really lovely, a lot of time. I mean when we—“ Mitchell stops at the corner and waits for Jack to catch up to the fact that the walking has been suspended.

“Are we,” he says, flapping a hand between them. “You know, there yet?”

Jack thinks it over and then leans up against the post of the Walk/Don’t Walk sign. His back must be getting damp but he doesn’t appear to care. “Define there?”

“Are we at the point where I can ask you about _our_ sex life in order to figure out shit about my _current_ sex life.”

“Do I have a choice here?”

“Yes?”

Jack sighs. “Mitchell. Okay, yes. Ask me.”

“We had less sex at the end. Like a lot less. And it was tense. It sucked. And a lot of that was my fault.”

Jack runs a hand through his hair. “Don’t. It’s fine.”

“I know, it’s just.” He takes a deep breath because he needs to get this out quick. "Other Jack and I are having a lot less sex and everything else is not tense, it’s cuddly and warm and. . . nice.”

“Um.”

 _Shit_.

“Oh God, there’s nothing going wrong, I’m just. . . _shit_.”

“Not interested anymore, “ Jack says grimly, explaining it for him.

“No.”

After a moment, Mitchell turns on his heel, pauses, and starts walking again, giving Jack a cue to fall into step. Jack’s arm settles across his shoulders, a slightly better weight than the one he is suddenly carrying.

*

  
“I’m sorry. What?”

Paul is all lithe grace as he slides out of Jack’s embrace and off the couch. He stays kneeling there, eyes glimmering, as he repeats himself with obvious amusement. “I asked, Mitchell, if you’d be comfortable fooling around with me. With Jack here.”

Jack and Paul’s coffee table is littered with party hats and noisemakers and horrifying plastic glasses that spell out 2014 right across your face. “But Jack. . . and I. . .”

Paul drops to all fours -- _holy God_  --and actually crawls a little over toward where Mitchell sits on the floor. They all got too looped to actually go bar-hopping but not so looped that this proposition is undoable and it strikes Mitchell that maybe that was planned.

“Personally,” Paul says, “ _I’d_ like to see that, but we assumed it would make you uncomfortable and—"

“And we had a long discussion about how many shades of clusterfuck that would be,” Jack finishes from the couch, where his hand is clutched around his tumbler, which is looking pretty empty again.

“That’s not happening,” Mitchell says quickly.

“No,” Jack agrees.

“You’re okay with this?” Mitchell asks. The question is posed to Jack but he’s looking at Paul who is so close now, close enough for things to get really bad really fast. Or really good.

“More than I thought I’d be. But it’s your choice.”

Paul is smiling and when Mitchell steals a single glance at Jack, he’s smiling too, although quite differently. Mitchell hesitates for a moment, and then slides his glasses off his face. Paul takes them from his hand, and he must reach back and rest them on an end table somewhere, but Mitchell misses the movement, because Paul’s lips are on his, full and warm with the soft shivering touch of his beard rubbing against Mitchell’s face.

“You look so good,” Jack says a bit later, on an exhale. He means Paul, but it’s clear from everything else that follows, that he means Mitchell, too.

*

“Mitchell, _what_?”

“Nothing! What what? What are you talking about?” Oona doesn’t even stop typing to accuse him of. . . whatever. She’s still stabbing away at her laptop to make a deadline and can still manage to judge him with the eyes that are apparently in the back of her head.

“You have clearly gotten laid and you—“

Mitchell drops the _Food & Wine_ he was leafing through right on the floor. “Wait, how on Earth can you tell?”

The  _bitch, please_ face Oona shoots over her shoulder is nearly piteous. Mitchell is kind of relieved she doesn’t answer but then he didn’t really expect her to. “You have _clearly_ gotten laid and if I were a betting woman. . . hold on. I’m definitely a betting woman. Four to one, you topped. In the last 24 hours, max.” She whips around in her seat and squints at Mitchell as if she’s trying to divine his fortune from his increasingly apoplectic expression. “So either you did something super slutty, which, come on, you’re _not_ keeping that shit from me. Or you don’t want me to know who.”

Mitchell has known Oona long enough to know there’s no escaping the inevitable. She _is_ the inevitable. “You know how I told you over Christmas break –“

She gives an exasperated sigh and starts typing again. “We don’t have Christmas break, Mitchell, we’re adults now. I assume you mean the Very Cockyboys New Year’s Eve you had at Jack’s apartment with him and Jimmy Olsen, who actually was on Christmas break.”

“So they broke up,” Mitchell says, closing his eyes.

At least the typing stops. “Over-- _Mitchell_.” Oona turns her chair around to look at him just as he lets his eyes open again.

“Not over that. That wasn’t a totally new thing for them anyway and _not_ over me. No. Normal things. Distance. I don’t think it’s permanent, anyway. They’re talking about it like it’s for now, until school is over.”

Oona says nothing, which is scarier than anything Oona might say and face facts, _everything_ Oona says is at least a little scary.

“We. . .” Mitchell says, and falters, because what can he say?

They saw each other three times after the breakup. The first involved whiskey on Jack’s stoop, drunk mostly by Jack who threw up on his own new shoes and also Mitchell’s Vans . It was all good, in a horrible way, because that’s the shit friends do for each other when one of them breaks up with the boy he’s crazy over. The second time they had dinner paid for by Mitchell’s first paycheck from his new job because _yay, new job_ . He’d prattled on about having an assistant and bitched about learning how the video editing software worked and Jack mostly ate and smiled and was happy for him. There was zero sexual tension. It was just really nice.

The third time. . .

The third time Mitchell went to Jack’s apartment because Jack had insisted on cooking him dinner in thanks for the actual, awesome restaurant meal. Mitchell was surprised by how little the apartment had changed in light of the “break-up” – and yes, he was using uneasy finger quotes even if Jack insisted it was over, because “over, for now,” just really doesn’t count, please.

The third time there was wine, and the couch and a comfortable proximity that began to swell into lots of sexual tension. It felt good and permissible, and what harm could a kiss do? He’d been naked in front of Jack two months ago, right there in the living room, under incredibly different circumstances. And, also, under Jack’s then-boyfriend. So what harm could some groping do? Some naked groping.

Once the naked groping moved to the bedroom, it was pretty clear it could do some harm. In the moment, Mitchell didn’t really care. It was like first-time sex melded with long-term relationship sex in all the best possible ways. And none of the baggage of an actual relationship. But.

“It was amazing,” Mitchell admits quietly. He stares at the coffee table. Oona huffs a sigh and then another. For a long moment it seems like she’s gearing up to rip into him. But instead she puts her laptop on sleep, shoves back her stool and sweeps across the floor, grabbing her beer as she goes. She settles next to him on the couch, with no superfluous touch or overture, just their arms rammed up against one another.

Mitchell deflates, his head resting back on the couch, close to Oona’s shoulder.

“Thanks,” he says.

“Yeah,” she replies, and knocks back a long swig of her beer, nudging his head up a bit, then letting it roll back down.

*

“So, I think Paul’s going to come back,” Jack says. He sets a latte down in front of Mitchell and sets his own black coffee beside it. He sits next to Mitchell on the bench rather than on the chair opposite him; it’s a strange parallel of Oona two months ago, saying little and delivering her presence.

“He’s transferring? He’s not dropping out,” Mitchell says, suddenly alarmed.

“No, no,” Jack assures him. “But for the summer. Instead of staying out there.”

“That’s good, right?”

“It is. It is, right?”

“Yeah,” Mitchell says. He rubs a hand over Jack’s knee, through his jeans, which are a bit stiff, still new. “It’ll be really good to see him.”

“I was thinking maybe we could rent a place in Asbury Park for a week? In August?”

“I do not do sun, you know this.”

“We’ll go to the beach, you can sleep all day, and we’ll drink in the evening. Oona can come and be the entertainment. Or house mother.”

“All of the above, plus demi-god.”

“Right, that. Would you be interested?”

“Yeah.”

“Speaking of.”

“Hmm?”

"That boy over there has been staring at you since I was at the counter."

"What? No," Mitchell says reflexively.

"You ass," Jack says and it is fond and full of history. Everything is good. "Bitch, over there."

Jack looks around, a bit bewildered, seeing no aforementioned boy and no promised staring and-- _oh_.

He looks uncertain himself, dark hair in a pompadour and an olive complexion. Hoops in both ears and Other Jack did a lot of things for Mitchell but one of them was teach him just how hot he found piercings after all. He’s got a tablet and an open notebook on the table in front of him, a glass full of melting ice right beside his hand. His open-mouthed expression of _duh_ reconfigures in the space of a breath to buttoned up, found out, caught. Then he smiles.

“Oh,” Mitchell says, heart pierced, then and there. And Jack’s right beside him.

“Go say hi, sweetie,” Jack says, and gives him a push.


End file.
